Ok, let's see here....
80s' front suspensions are a radius arm setup w/ two bushing per side as noted above. If you imagine the axle's path of motion as it articulates(one side up, one side down) you will see that the axle actually twists as it moves. Because the control arms are attached at 4 points, two things can happen, the bushings give and allow the aforementioned deflection, or the axle tubes twist. Obviously the axle tubes don't twist, so the bushings must deflect. One of the things I noticed about the 80's radius arms right off the bat is how relatively small the bushings are. When you compare these to the bushings used on most Jeep setups, they look absolutely tiny. Because they are so small, they can only deflect so much. Add to the fact that the fact that many are installing the OME bushings which I *believe* are poly(someone please correct me if I'm mistaken), and you have very limited bushing deflection.
I would imagine there are ways to solve this problem, such as wristing one of the control arms, fabbing control arms with provisions for larger/softer bushings, or simply removing one of the connection points(leaving you with 2 connections/bushings/bolts on one side, and 1 on the other). This would alleviate a substantial amount of bind and I believe open up the flex substantially. Of course once that happens, the shock lengths, brakelines, and swaybar become the limiting factor.
The problem with opening up the flex in the front is that the flex is no longer balanced and you get what I like to call the backhoe effect. This is where the rear axle feels as if it is fixed to the chassis and only the front articulates. This is probably the number one biggest problem with Cherokees. The rear leaf suspensions don't flex very well at all(without a good bit of custom work) because the fronts flex SO easily.
Here's a picture of my old Cherokee when it had a bolt-on 4.5" kit:
and here's a picture with my 3-link setup(radius arm style, but missing the 4th connection point):
Many are impressed by the amount of flex shown in the last pic, but honestly it was a detriment to the rig. As you can see the coils would fall out, and the rear suspension didn't do much of anything. This leads to very akward and sometimes unstable situations when traversing an obstacle. There are a lot of things that I think could open up the 80's suspension considerably, but since I have commited to not 'wheel mine nearly as hard as I did the Cherokee, I will probably not be experimenting with them any time soon.
Hope this was helpful.
Ary
